Customers Say Hybrid Cloud Is The Future, Rackspace Survey Finds

We’ve heard from our customers that while the public cloud is great it isn’t right for every application or workload; and our recent survey confirms that US and UK enterprises are turning to the hybrid cloud[1] to overcome the limitations of a public cloud-only infrastructure.

This new study, which was conducted by independent market research specialist Vanson Bourne, found that 60 percent of respondents have moved or are considering moving certain applications or workloads either partially (41 percent) or completely (19 percent) off of the public cloud due to its limitations or to experience the benefits of other platforms like hybrid clouds; public cloud, private cloud and dedicated servers working together in any combination. Already, roughly 72 percent of survey respondents said a portion of their application portfolio leverages the hybrid cloud.

The hybrid cloud is the future for many companies, our research revealed. Instead of a hybrid cloud approach being a stepping stone to public cloud; it’s the opposite: the public cloud is a stepping stone to a hybrid cloud. Sixty percent of respondents said a hybrid cloud is the culmination of their cloud journey – it is their future.

Businesses have found that, like all technologies, the public cloud has pros and cons. While it delivers the ability to get computing capacity in real-time with a utility pricing model, it’s not the catchall solution for all workloads, especially I/O intensive applications like databases and Big Data platforms.

Many of our customers find that when it comes to the cloud one size does not fit all and that some workloads run well in the public cloud, while others run best on dedicated bare-metal servers. At the same time, some workloads are more suited for private clouds, which can be on-premises or hosted in our data center. This has led many of our customers to seek out a cloud that empowers them to run their applications or workloads where they can achieve the highest performance for the lowest total cost. They crave the freedom to leverage the cloud where, when and how they want and the ability to select from a blend of services that is the best fit for their specific applications. That’s the power of the hybrid cloud.

Take Rackspace customer Action for Children[2], for example. Action for Children is one of the UK’s largest charities and it uses Rackspace’s Hybrid Cloud to get the privacy, security and control of dedicated servers coupled with the burstability of the public cloud.

“In the past we used public cloud for many of our applications and workloads, but as we grew it became clear that some of these applications were becoming too complex for a public cloud-only deployment. We chose a hybrid cloud solution from Rackspace, which includes public cloud, to ensure adequate control over our infrastructure, and have also enjoyed performance, reliability, security and cost benefits,” Action for Children’s Darren Robertson said.

This ability to use a blend of public cloud, private cloud and dedicated bare-metal to create a common computing architecture delivers optimized security, performance, uptime and total cost versus using the public cloud alone. And our survey respondents agree. They said hybrid clouds are winning out over public cloud-only deployments for various reasons, including:

On average, respondents using hybrid clouds reported a 17 percent reduction in cost vs. using the public cloud alone.

These results confirm that businesses large and small are moving to the hybrid cloud because it combines the best of all worlds: public cloud, private cloud and dedicated servers to deliver a common architecture that is the best fit for their specific needs with improved costs. And you don’t have to tailor your application to meet the limitations of the public cloud; a hybrid cloud can be tailored to you.

For many, a hybrid cloud is truly a bridge to the future.

For more on the Rackspace Hybrid Cloud Survey[3], including detailed survey results, please see the Rackspace Knowledge Center[4].

Want to hear more about the hybrid cloud? Check out what our hybrid cloud customers our saying[5].